Here is where I plan to Blog Emacspeak tricks and introduce new features as I implement them.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Reading Web Content Efficiently

reading-web-content.org

1 Reading Web Content

1.1 Background

I still find reading Web content in emacs to be way more
efficient than in modern browsers like Chrome with ChromeVox
enabled.
Chrome+ChromeVox is what I use for rich Web Applications;
but when it comes down to reading straight content ranging from
technical documentation to news and current affairs, I find that
I can read a lot more content in a fixed amount of time with
Emacs+Emacspeak than I can with the Chrome+ChromeVox combination.

1.2 Welcome EWW: Emacs Web Wowser

The author of GNUS recently added package
EWW (Emacs Web Wowser) to The Emacs repository —
see his
announcement.
Emacspeak 37.0 included a small addition called shr-url that
leveraged his earlier shr package; I've now added support for
EWW in the Emacspeak source tree. Note that EWW is in the Emacs
source tree, i.e. it will be part of Emacs 24.4, but you can use
it now if you build your own version of Emacs, or obtain an
Emacs that is build from the Emacs source repository.

EWW and SHR are interesting because they both leverage
libxml2 to parse the incoming HTML. This is way faster than
the native elisp browsing used in Emacs/W3. In my personal
opinion, it also opens up more possibilities than Emacs/W3M with
respect to manipulating and filtering content from elisp ---
something that helps create a better reading experience when
using Emacspeak.

1.3 EWW Tips And Tricks

I've mailed out a small patch to package eww that facilitates
implementing such higher-level commands; for now, you can find
that patch in emacspeak/lisp/patches in the Emacspeak svn
repository. With that patch in place, you can do the following to
efficiently filter popular news sites such as the New York Times
(I use http://mobile.nytimes.com) or CNN
(http://cnn.com).